Scenes from a Marriage

Welcome, everyone! I say that because that last post seems to have exponentially increased the readership of this blog. Because sometimes the world is fair, and "Xaime Hernandez" is still a more googled search term than "people who think their jobs are interesting enough to blog about." (That the world is more often unfair is evidenced by the fact that "Paris Hilton crotch" is probably more googled than any of the above.)

It's unlikely I'll be able to capture the mass appeal of that post any time soon. So why try? Here, instead, is a blast from the past. I was looking around my hard drive for old projects and found these, which hadn’t been opened since 2003, and I think the project may have even been before that. (Which probably means I ought to clean up and back up my drives a lot more often that I do, but that’s another story.) So if my memory’s a little shaky on these, forgive me.

As I recall, Scenes from a Marriage was a pretty straightforward assignment, whose high standing in my memory is primarily due to what I thought was a really nice color palate on the final packaging. Very 70s-tastic.

These first couple came out of a very literal reading of the title: “scenes” represented as, essentially, polaroids. I think these are the first occurrence of my now oft-proposed (and oft-rejected) diptych comps—there’s something I like about the simple “non-design” juxtaposition of two images. (I’ve just recently gotten a series like that approved as part of Criterion’s new Eclipse line—the Late Ozu set.) I still think there’s something to that first one, the he comforts her/she comforts him sturm und drang is a pretty nice representation of the film. I have no idea what I was thinking with that horrible handwriting font on the second, though—let’s assume that’s just a placeholder, that I would have written that out in my own hand before anything printed.



Another (less successful, I think) variation on that “scenes” theme:



The type on this next is again somewhat questionable, but I quite like the image:



A couple fairly straightforward ideas. I can’t remember why I thought it was a good idea to blur that first image so much, but I’m sure I had a good (and completely over-thought) reason at the time.



And here was the final winner.



The simplest of the bunch, which is almost always the right way to go for a Bergman film. I still dig the way the title and Bergman’s name interlock, though it’s probably overstepping my purview to suggest so strongly that the film represents scenes from Bergman’s marriage. I have no idea what Bergman’s marriage is like; I hope it’s very happy and not particularly like the tumultuous relationship in this film.

(I had a couple people tell me they thought the poster for The Break-Up was stolen from this design, which was kind of flattering, to think anyone would steal from me. But that’s silly for two reasons: first, the masking tape dividing line was really the whole point of that Break-Up design and second, I’m hardly the first person to ever do “two people sitting up in bed at the bottom of a vertical frame.”)

In the end, I’m pretty happy with this project—the complete packaging maybe moreso than the cover, per se, but that’s alright, too. Since I’ve referenced it a couple of times now, here’s a couple of shots of the rest of the packaging: